Excellence in Turbomachinery Research: The Best of the 14th European Turbomachinery Conference

The COVID-19 pandemic has not prevented the regular development of the dissemination activities promoted by Euroturbo (www.euroturbo.eu, accessed on 25 August 2022), the European Turbomachinery Society, the world leader not-for-profit international scientific organization committed to the dissemination, exchange, and publication of top quality research in the field of turbomachinery, propulsion, and power generation. Those objectives are most noticeably achieved through the promotion and management of the European Turbomachinery Conferences (ETC) and of the Society journal, the International Journal of Turbomachinery, Propulsion, and Power [1] (www.mdpi.com/journal/ijtpp, accessed on 25 August 2022). Euroturbo has inherited and progressed the coordination work of the German and English Engineering Associations, VDI (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure) and IMechE (Institution of Mechanical Engineers), and of the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, which has led to the ETC series, initiated nearly thirty years ago in Erlangen, Germany. Since then, the European Turbomachinery Conferences have gained popularity and international credit, so much that their proceedings have been included by Elsevier in the Scopus database, and by Clarivate in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI), a clear indication of the fact that they represent the leading edge turbomachinery research, revealing emerging trends and new ideas before they appear in scientific journals. The visibility and the impact of the articles offered to the ETCs, most of which are available for free download in the Euroturbo repository, are undoubtedly huge. A further promotion of the top research embodied in the ETC proceedings is attained through the IJTPP, the society journal. The International Journal of Turbomachinery Propulsion and Power has been conceived to fill the existing gap of a high-quality international research platform granting effective and unrestricted dissemination of the research findings to a wide readership. The Open Access format of the journal contributes to meet those objectives while complying with the EU policy to Open Science in Europe.

Because of the pandemic restrictions, the 14th European Turbomachinery Conference was necessarily a virtual event, coordinated by the Institute for Fluid Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Science in Gdansk (IMP-PAN). As customary in the ETC series, top-quality articles have been proposed for archival journal publication in the IJTPP and enjoyed prompt publication and immediate exposure. Out of all contributions accepted for presentation at the conference, fifteen articles were rated of journal quality according to the very rigorous review process completed by a team of (at least) three independent reviewers coordinated by a senior scientist serving as Handling Editor, under the general coaching of the Society Review Chairman. The requirements to enter the excellence category are rather strict and unquestionable. To be elected of journal quality the average rating of all reviewers must be above the journal threshold, the majority of them must be in favor of the decision, and the Handling Editor needs to be in favor too. It goes without saying that the number of those articles is necessarily a small fraction of the whole set. Yet, their quality is rather high. This is best shown with the help of the article access statistics reported in Figure 1. In about one year of open access the average abstract view and full manuscript download rate is appreciably over one thousand, while the average citation rate is 1.2 (data not shown), a remarkable result indeed.

Nine of those fifteen papers are of computational nature, while six deal with experimental work. Many of them have either been internally supported by the contributing organizations or have been funded by their National Research Agencies. Turbine aerodynamic and aero-acoustic studies (Brind and Pullan [2], Al-am et al. [3], Franke et al. [4], Foret et al. [5], Gaetani et al. [6]) prevail over a compressor study (Lamidel et al. [7]), while attention has been paid to turbulence modelling and measurements (Marioni et al. [8] and Sanz et al. [9]). Advanced turbine heat transfer concepts have also been dealt through experimental and numerical studies (Wambersie et al. [10], Trompoukis et al. [11]). Unsteadiness attracts much interest in various fundamental research aspects as documented by the work of Brandstetter et al. [12] and Windemuth et al. [13]. Radial turbomachinery research is also considered in several details (Schroeder et al. [14], Wittmann et al. [15], Liao et al. [16]).

While turbine remains the most popular subject category, other previously rarely addressed topics are attracting increasing interest. This reflects the community’s major research efforts aimed at identifying new technology leaps ready to be applied in the next generation of turbomachinery and turbomachinery-based propulsion and power system generation, meeting the energy transition challenge.